Octopus Energy takes on Avro customers

MWT

beeniecarol said:

I don't understand; why would making a one off payment be asking for trouble?  Do I need to change my approach?

You are doing the right thing, keeping up to date on the payments and not letting debt build up.

A perfect example of how to handle the current situation.

polymaff

Does anyone have experience as to what level of debt Octopus will tolerate before demanding a top-up?

Consumerist

polymaff said:

Does anyone have experience as to what level of debt Octopus will tolerate before demanding a top-up?

I suspect, in the current circumstances, all bets are off and any serious debt will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. If you have a plan to catch up, hopefully Octopus will be amenable to helping you get over any short-term bumps in the road.

Merlin139

For me Octopus are waiting for Avro to produce a New Final Bill as the one produced dated 29th September does not include the DD of £65 I paid Avro on 14th October as per Octopus saying don't cancel my DD.

I am £128.65 in credit to Avro which should one day find its way to Octopus. I opened an account with Octopus as requested during October as requested by Octopus and they set up a DD but one that will bill me once they produce a bill. I have provided 15 readings since 1st November for Gas and Electricity. No bills produced.

I have set up a spreadsheet and worked out what I owe Octopus. This money is safely tucked up in a savings account earning around 1% as it with other money. Have got totally fed up with contacting Octopus over the last 5 months. More so during the last 2 months requesting that they update their Avro-Octopus information page to provide an update for the 8% of customers to transfer across. The answer given on each occasion is that it will be updated when it changes.

Not chasing anymore and will deal with the situation as I see fit when they sort it out.

Only owe them about £260 if you take into consideration my Avro credit.

Pootle1

beeniecarol said:

I don't understand; why would making a one off payment be asking for trouble?  Do I need to change my approach?

A few years ago I was a customer of a different startup utility company and when I left they did not repay my credit for over a year. I'm concerned that if I pay a one-off payment it might ignored/forgotten/lost by Octopus, and I would still have to pay astronomical DDs. Once bitten, twice shy. 

I would rather save the money and wait for Octopus to catch up. My worry is the unknown size of my debt.

victor2

Pootle1 said:

beeniecarol said:

I don't understand; why would making a one off payment be asking for trouble?  Do I need to change my approach?

A few years ago I was a customer of a different startup utility company and when I left they did not repay my credit for over a year. I'm concerned that if I pay a one-off payment it might ignored/forgotten/lost by Octopus, and I would still have to pay astronomical DDs. Once bitten, twice shy. 

I would rather save the money and wait for Octopus to catch up. My worry is the unknown size of my debt.

You said you have readings from last August, which you took from the In House Display. If that is still working, take them now and work out your usage in kWH from them. Then you can work out your cost to date on the Octopus tariff. Will be a bit high because Avro didn't go bust until September, but if you put that amount of money aside, you'll be more than covered, especially if you were in credit with Avro.
If you need help working it out, post the readings on here and someone will help. Will also need your current Octopus rates, as they vary by region a bit

BooJewels

Pootle1 said:

beeniecarol said:

I don't understand; why would making a one off payment be asking for trouble?  Do I need to change my approach?

 My worry is the unknown size of my debt.

I'm afraid that we, as customers, also have some responsibility in the arrangement - you can easily remedy that situation by taking control of your meter readings, applying a little attention with a pencil and calculator and do some sums and you'll then know (possibly only approximately) what your debt is.  If you're not making regular payments to Octopus already, you should at least be putting aside what you were expecting to pay, so that you're ready when they present a bill.  By keeping on top of it yourself, there won't be any nasty surprises.

If you don't know how to do this for yourself, we can help you through it - but you'll need to provide some meter readings and your tariff if you know it - if not, your region, so someone else might know it - as the actual price varies by region.

victor2

Snap!!

oliverbrown

A big update today:

UPDATE TUESDAY 8th MARCH

Now that the transfer of Avro customers is very nearly complete, we’re not updating this page regularly, but do get in touch with our team any time for an update on your account.

From April 2nd, you’ll be moving to our new Flexible Octopus tariff: £50 under the Price Cap and the cheapest variable tariff of any major energy supplier. We'll email you really soon with full details but do read more about our new variable prices here and scroll to the bottom for your unit prices and charges.

Are you struggling to pay your bills?

We’re doubling our Octopus Assist fund to £5m to help more households. If you're an Octopus customer struggling to pay your bills, please let us know through our Financial Support tool – we'll help wherever we can.

If you’re still waiting for your energy account to transfer to Octopus, thanks so much for bearing with us. We know it’s been a long wait, so we wanted to give a bit of detail about our process to work through the remaining few accounts.

Transferring an account over is a 4 step process, and at each point something can go wrong. The accounts that’ve been moved over to us automatically already were simple, and made it through every step: the account data we received from Avro was good, and we found no hiccups anywhere from meter details to readings to payments.

To create your final Avro bill, we need to pass steps 1 and 2 successfully: getting hold of your meter readings and payments from Avro. Once we have it we’ll send you over a PDF bill to review. The 3rd step is a bit more complex. It’s where we need to line up our operating system with Avro’s to make sure we can move the data over correctly. Where things don’t line up perfectly, problems can be created: even down to small details, like our system thinking it shouldn’t have taken a certain meter on supply.  These take manual work for our experts to spot and fix, but we’re working through them as quickly and thoroughly as we can.

In the final step, we then transfer your financial data over to Octopus. Once again lining our systems up can throw up unforeseen issues. Our team are working through thoroughly and discovering/fixing new mismatches every day: like for example, Avro’s systems labelled meter registered with a “01”, while we start them with just a “1”. Whenever we encounter something like this we fix it as quickly as possible. It’s like having to push square pegs through into round holes, but only some people have access to the pegs and they can’t always talk to the squares, and there aren’t as many people with access to the right pieces to complete the picture.

If you'd like an update at any time, our team really are here to help.

polymaff

Consumerist said:

polymaff said:

Does anyone have experience as to what level of debt Octopus will tolerate before demanding a top-up?

I suspect, in the current circumstances, all bets are off and any serious debt will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. If you have a plan to catch up, hopefully Octopus will be amenable to helping you get over any short-term bumps in the road.

Hence my quest for experiences, rather than begs-the-question terminology such as highlighted above ;-}

As I wrote some weeks ago, many - myself included - may skid back and forth along the credit/debit line during the phoney war of April to October.  From there on it is Energy Armageddon.

I see that Martin's guess is a further 40-something percent.  Brave man.